“Who do you read?”
Whom do you read, she said in her head. Out loud, she said, “Lately I’ve been into Jenny Zhang. But Poe is my favorite.”
The man looked upward, as though trying to remember something, then said, “‘For the moon never beams without making me dream of the beautiful Annabel Lee.’”
Abigail laughed. “Oh, look at you, quoting poetry in the firelight.” She didn’t mention that he’d gotten the quote wrong.
“I got lucky. That’s one of the few poems I know.”
“Well, trust me. Any opportunity you get to quote a poem, you’ve got to take it these days. It’s a dying art.”
“Says the person who works at a poetry publisher.”
“I’m hanging on for dear life. It’s a good place to work, actually.”
The man smiled, more of a smirk. He really was handsome, despite the new agey bracelet and the whitened teeth. “When I asked you what you did for a living, I thought you were going to say you were a hedge fund manager or something, the way you talked about your parents.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, only that you seemed cynical about trying to make a living in the arts. I figured you’d have gone into something more stable.”
“No, that’s my fiancé. He’s not a hedge fund manager, but he invests in start-up companies. He can finance my career in the arts, for what it’s worth.”
“Is that why you’re marrying him?”
An ember had floated out from the firepit and landed on Abigail’s sweater. The man’s sweater, actually, Abigail thought. She swatted at it, hoping it wouldn’t leave a mark.
“What did you ask?”
“I asked if you’re marrying your fiancé because he’s wealthy, and now that I’m repeating that, I realize it’s none of my business.”
“No, that’s okay. And also no, that’s not why I’m marrying Bruce, but I do think I’m probably marrying him because of the personality traits that make him rich.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Before I was with Bruce I was with this guy for a long time. He was a writer, a poet. We had a lot in common, I guess, but it was exhausting. He was constantly asking me to read things he’d written or sharing things he’d read. He had this notion of a creative life together, that we’d be broke, and happy, and constantly drunk, and misunderstood. And I got sick of it. Bruce is simple, but in a really good way. All his validation comes from his work, and his work is essentially bankrolling creative people. It’s just so nice to go see a movie with him, and not have him react with rage, or jealousy, or monologue at me about the hidden themes of what we’ve just seen.”
“So you’re saying he’s boring.”
“Who, Bruce? Yes, and it’s awesome.”
“So, the writer guy, what was his name?”
“His name was Ben.”
“So what number was Ben?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was he number two of the men you slept with?”
Ben Perez and Abigail were in the same incoming class at Wesleyan, both English majors, but they didn’t meet until they shared a class called Waugh, Greene, Spark during the second semester of sophomore year.
After that first class they walked to the dining hall as though they’d done it a hundred times, ate together, and that night went to see Black Narcissus at the Center for Film Studies on campus. They stayed up late in Ben’s single dormitory room, the window cracked, sharing a pack of Camel Blues and a bottle of cheap burgundy, listening to Nino Rota soundtracks. Abigail was instantly infatuated, and that whole first day and night with Ben was filled with the terrifying and thrilling feeling that she’d just met the person who might be the most important person in her life. Her freshman year she’d dated a senior named Mark Copley, who was both Wesleyan’s top tennis player and the editor of its lit magazine. Their relationship was a strictly weekend affair—Friday night parties after which Abigail would spend the night at Mark’s off-campus apartment. Sometimes she’d stay for the weekend, but not always. Abigail, who tended to relate all the occurrences in her life to books or movies, saw her relationship with Mark as two sophisticated partners living lives both separate and together. She thought of Tomas and Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, how the regulated infrequency of their time spent together was what kept it alive. Still, Abigail wound up being hurt when Mark never introduced her to his parents over graduation weekend, and she wasn’t surprised when he told her that now that he was no longer in college, he thought they should stop seeing each other.
“You don’t want to waste your next three years of college with a college graduate. I’ll cramp your style,” he said.
“I think you mean I’ll cramp your style,” Abigail replied.
“That, too,” he said.
So it actually felt good that immediately after meeting Ben, Abigail was plunged into an intense romance, the two of them joined at the hip, living, it seemed, in each other’s mind. They saw the same movies, read the same books. He wanted to write poetry, and Abigail, although she didn’t admit it to anyone but Ben, dreamt of being a novelist. They were together for the next three years of college, and then moved to New York City immediately after graduation, getting an apartment downtown not a whole lot bigger than a one-car garage. Ben changed after college, although it took two years for Abigail to really notice. At school, he’d been content to be a student, to be learning from others, honing his craft, absorbing the world. But once they were settled in New York, Abigail getting a job at Bonespar Press and Ben working at the Strand Book Store, he became obsessed with making it as a poet, befriending a circle of slam and spoken-word poets (even though he claimed to despise those particular genres), and spending more time sending out poems to literary magazines than actually writing them. When he got rejections, he sulked for days, and when he got accepted his mood would improve, but for diminishing lengths of time. He spent hours on the internet getting into fights on comment boards, and he drank constantly. Abigail joined him, but only at night. They would meet friends at Pete’s Tavern, and Ben would argue with anyone about anything, something he’d always done, but it was starting to exhaust Abigail. They brought the arguments home with them from the bar, and sometimes, hungover and exhausted the following morning, Abigail couldn’t even remember what they’d been fighting about. It was always something minor, like the time Abigail told Ben that she loved Shakespeare in Love and he’d been so upset that he disappeared for an entire night.
Three years after college, Abigail was ready to leave Ben, trying to figure out the best way to do it, when, by chance, she spotted him coming out of McSorley’s Tavern, his arm draped around a mutual friend of theirs, Ruth, a jewelry maker living in Brooklyn. Abigail felt a surge of betrayal and anger, like a sudden punch to her stomach, but that feeling lasted for less than an hour. He’d given her a way out and she took it. Still, untangling their relationship, both logistically and emotionally, took nearly a year. It was the same year that the Boxgrove Theatre went out of business, and her parents, who had always represented, at least to Abigail, pillars of competent adulthood, suddenly seemed like a pair of frightened children. Abigail went home every weekend to help them deal with the enormous amount of stuff—the props and costuming—they’d acquired in twenty years, but also to provide emotional support. It wasn’t just that they were crushed by the failure of their business, they were crushed by what they both perceived as the failure of their lives. And they were in debt, mainly because of the loans they’d taken out in order to send Abigail to Wesleyan. All of this—the dissolution of her relationship with Ben, her parents’ failures—made Abigail feel hollowed out, purposeless.